Reid flexes muscle after Senate election triumph

Commentary: Majority leader is ‘third man’ in fiscal cliff talks

WASHINGTON (MarketWatch) — This month’s election did bring triumph to a Mormon politician, though not the one Republicans had hoped for.

While Republican presidential nominee Mitt Romney suffered a decisive defeat, his fellow Mormon, Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid of Nevada, is emerging as one of the big winners from the vote two weeks ago.

Democrats not only defended 23 Senate seats in the election but actually increased their majority by two seats, defying predictions that the Republicans, who only had 10 seats up for re-election, would easily capture the upper chamber.

Reuters

Harry Reid has been vocal on many matters since the election.

Reid, like the majority leaders before him, already enjoyed considerable power — setting the Senate agenda, determining when and what comes to a vote, controlling committee appointments and a wide range of other nominations — but the election has strengthened his hand and he is clearly relishing his increased freedom of action.

The battles in Washington — over the fiscal cliff and other urgent issues — are being portrayed largely as a contest between President Barack Obama and House Speaker John Boehner.

But Reid is the “third man” in this power lineup. Not only is he fed up with Republican obstructionism in the Senate, he is also wary of Obama’s over-eagerness to compromise and will no longer need to defend the president from Republican efforts to sabotage his re-election.

For instance, while Republicans still talk as though entitlement reform can be part of a grand bargain heading off the automatic spending cuts and tax increases known as the fiscal cliff, Reid joined 28 other senators in signing a letter in September pledging to keep Social Security benefit cuts off the table in deficit negotiations and reiterated that position after the election.

It’s not likely that the president will try to include changes to Social Security in any deal with the Republicans in defiance of the Senate majority leader.

Bernanke warns of 'fiscal cliff' danger

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Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke warned of the dangers of the "fiscal cliff" in a speech Tuesday, saying all the automatic tax increases and spending cuts would pose "a substantial threat to the recovery."

In another post-election skirmish, bank lobbyists are mobilizing to keep Massachusetts Senator-elect Elizabeth Warren off the Banking Committee, even though her long background as a consumer advocate in financial services makes her better qualified than most to serve on it.

But committee appointments for Democrats lie in the purview of the majority leader. While there are other candidates for the two open Democratic slots on the banking panel, it was Reid who first brought Warren to Washington by nominating her to head the oversight panel for the bank bailout and the current betting inside the Beltway is that Warren can have a position if she wants it.

Reid has already flexed his muscles in other ways to show Republicans that things will be different going forward.

He has promised filibuster reform — not doing away with the filibuster altogether but perhaps eliminating the “motion to proceed” in legislation, thus removing an opportunity to use, or abuse, the filibuster in purely procedural votes.

He shut down Sen. John McCain’s appeal for a Special Committee to investigate the attack on American diplomats in Benghazi, writing dismissively in a letter to McCain as the ranking member of the Armed Services Committee, “I refuse to allow the Senate to be used as a venue for baseless partisan attacks.”

Never shy in his commentary — he led the charge this summer in insisting that Romney should release more tax returns — Reid has been vocal on a number of matters since the election, and his remarks get a lot of play.

He dismissed the claims to bipartisanship by Sen. Scott Brown, who lost his seat to Warren, as a “big joke,” labeling him one of the most partisan members of the Senate. Reid said he had no worries about keeping Massachusetts’ second Senate seat in Democratic hands if John Kerry vacated it to take a Cabinet position.

In short, it is a feisty Harry Reid who is ready to finish off this lame-duck Congress and move into the 113th Congress holding the whip hand.

It doesn’t mean he’s not open to compromise, but he’s making it clear that compromise will be a two-way street and not a series of Republicans taking legislation hostage, as happened so often in the past two years.

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